The Cult of True Womanhood

"The Cult of True Womanhood" by Barbara Welter portrays the situation of women in the United States, in the nineteenth century. Where as most women write about fighting for women's rights in this nation, Welter took on the initiative to write about something different. Her role in writing The Cult of True Womanhood came to be educating peoples about the life of a woman in the 19th century. Womanhood according to Welter's article absorbed the life of domestication with the occupation of the ideal housewife.
To illustrate, Welter seemed to provide a sufficient amount of information on womanhood in the 19th century United States. According to Welter, women back in the day assumed the role of housewife as men assume the roles of being the providers of the family. Women in general seem to have been predestined to be homemakers as if it were in their blood or something. In the article Welter mentioned that a woman had to have been relatively pious in order to be a "true" woman. A woman's faithfulness to God above all else was the core of her drive and pursuit of life. If a woman were to relinquish her piety and sacredness, she would neither longer be true to herself, nor a true woman. Back in the 19th century it was proposed that men were mostly interested in the truest of all women, therefore woman had to be religious enough to be married, where she would in fact spread her religious zeal throughout the family of which she encompasses. A major issue Barbara talks about towards women living in the United States during the nineteenth century was how spouses treated each other. According to Welter the wife should obey and never leave her husband no matter what the consequences were such as abuse, cheating, and loneliness. The inferiority of women to men in the nineteenth century matched unreal characteristics compared to that of women living in the United States today. Women in that time were pressured to believe that God was judging them through their husbands, and